I thought they were dropping human verification altogether - as anyone who's run a forum can tell you there's no way around it. Anything left open on The Grid will be torn apart faster than you can say

Some captchas as so bad that I get it wrong even when it looks like I've gotten it absolutely right. I like the idea behind the captchas designed to help decipher books and what not, but it gets ridiculous.

Fark some of the captchas out there today. I get real farking tired of the ones where they make the font blurry and letters so close to each other that you can't tell whats what, or the ones that have a word then a picture of a number that's so small and blurry you can't read it .

jdamaral:Never understood the necessity for extremely complex captchas. Are there spambots roaming the internet capable of reading randomly generated letters or a phrase that's written in size 12 arial?

Maybe, all it takes is good OCR software. But, what they'll also do is snapshot the captcha and hash it to remember it then on one of their shady business sites they'll reuse the same image as their own captcha and have some hapless viagra pill seeker decipher it for them...then remember their answer for the next encounter.

jdamaral:Never understood the necessity for extremely complex captchas. Are there spambots roaming the internet capable of reading randomly generated letters or a phrase that's written in size 12 arial?

Friend of mine wrote code to break simple captchas. So the answer is, "yes".

BumpInTheNight:jdamaral: Never understood the necessity for extremely complex captchas. Are there spambots roaming the internet capable of reading randomly generated letters or a phrase that's written in size 12 arial?

Maybe, all it takes is good OCR software. But, what they'll also do is snapshot the captcha and hash it to remember it then on one of their shady business sites they'll reuse the same image as their own captcha and have some hapless viagra pill seeker decipher it for them...then remember their answer for the next encounter.

Or just hire some Indians or Chinese on the cheap to solve them en masse.

I once spent half an hour being denied by a google captcha. I sent them a mail about how they were impossible to read and spent the next week unable to use google sevices of any sort fue to my being a bot.Fark captcha over and over and leave it on the side of the road without a roll of quarters.

jdamaral:Never understood the necessity for extremely complex captchas. Are there spambotsinexpensive labour pools in China and India roaming the internet capable of reading randomly generated letters or a phrase that's written in size 12 arial?

My favorite (in seriousness, not snarling) is one that said "click all the kittens" and featured pictures of various small fuzzy animals. You can extend that concept as far as you want: click the blondes, put a check next to cities...whatever.

Fuggin Bizzy:My favorite (in seriousness, not snarling) is one that said "click all the kittens" and featured pictures of various small fuzzy animals. You can extend that concept as far as you want: click the blondes, put a check next to cities...whatever.

Caller Number 5:Interesting, but will this mean that their "Convenience Fees" will go down?

They're the only company that I've ever done business with that charges a delivery fee for an e-mail. They must have needed that to subsidize all the junk e-mail they sent me for a month after clicking the "unsubscribe" button.

Tark Ficketmaster. Seriously. They wanted $12 in fees on top of a $21 ticket to see the Harlem Globetrotters. That for literally doing nothing but pushing some ones and zeros to my email to print out. No human being was involved, nor did they have to package and mail me a ticket. I will no longer see any event that requires me to buy tickets through Ticketbastard. If I cant buy them direct from the venue and cut out Ticketbastard, I dont go.

In fact, I'm probably going to refuse to support any big artist who books through Ticketbastard (or its subsidiary Livenation, yeah the two biggest ticket merchants in the US are one company), as it shows a lack of regard for the artist's fans. Yeah, they control all the venues, etc, etc, fine. If you're big enough, dont do business with them. The most popular artists start their own record labels, ffs. Surely they can negotiate directly with a few concert halls. Its laziness, that their fans have to fund. Cut out the middle bastard and save your fans half of their ticket prices.

LOL because when Sparkfun webstore had a "free day" of prizes, they decided to defeat the people hitting "reload" incessantly and scripting reloads with a ReCaptcha solution equaling an entry. So, no scripting. Just endless captchas, some hilariously being Greek letters with no interpretation, just to piss you off really.